Thursday, 20 July 2017

I have spent the last week developing a web app for the TMC-1 Monitor Controller Remote, I
started because Toshiro Kobayashi from Tac Systems requested that we
increase the Pallet size on the TMC-1-Penta, one of his customers needed
to select from more that 16 inputs! In the next software update I
have doubled the size of the Pallet allowing a maximum of 34 inputs-
Main, Alt and 32 inputs in the Pallet.

I saw a problem
for users selecting the inputs from the pallet. Initially I thought to
make a computer app as an alternative selection tool but on discussion
with Daniel who works with me we decided that a web based app would be
more useful. Daniel had mentioned if it was possible to add a tablet
interface to the TMC-1 Monitor Controller Remote previously some months ago.

To
implement the app the TMC-1 Monitor Controller Remote becomes a server, allowing one device to be
connected. The web page is dynamic and both control the TMC-1 Monitor Controller Remote and
display the current status. There main problems to implement this on the
TMC-1 Monitor Controller Remote, Memory size and Status indication.

Memory size:

A
small DAW has 4 GBytes of memory, the TMC-1 has less than 1 MByte. To
send a web page you must first know its length, as page is dynamic the
software must first write the page in memory to calculate its length -
the memory size determines how much can be displayed.

Status:

The
best way to display the status is to use a web socket, however this
requires a encrypted handshake and json on the server in this case the
TMC-1. I decided that this was too much for the first implementation and
to use polling, A new menu allows selection of 8, 4 and 1 second
polling as well as manual update. To reduce the overhead the TMC-1 will
reply with no-change message unless a key is depressed.

Here is a screen capture of the output from a TMC-1-Penta

I may change the L/S keys for the TMC-1 User and Function keys, this will allow the user to select their function.